I made myself keep quiet for a few seconds. I had so much to say, I didn’t trust myself to get it all out coherently. When I thought I could speak without blithering, I continued:
‘About four years ago, I spent some time working with suicides. Failed suicides, of course, tricky to talk to the ones who . . . well, they have various reasons, come from various circumstances, but they have one thing in common.’
Helen had curled herself forward, arms crossed in front of her body, hands gripping her upper arms. She spoke to the rug at her feet. ‘What’s that? Despair?’
‘I guess. But the word I was going to use was emptiness. These people look into their future and they see nothing. They believe they have nothing to live for and so they don’t.’
She looked at me. ‘And that wasn’t Dana?’
Forcing myself to speak slowly, I leaned closer. ‘No way was it Dana. There was just too much going on in her life. She was determined to get to the bottom of this case . . . furious at the lack of cooperation she was getting. I’ve spoken to her several times over the last few days. She was fine – worried, angry, edgy – but definitely not empty. She wrote a note to me this morning. I’ll show it to you; it’s upstairs somewhere. It’s not the note of a suicide. Dana was not a suicide.’
‘They told me she’d been struggling to fit in, not relating to her colleagues, missing her old force . . . missing me.’ Her voice was unsteady.
‘Probably all true. But not nearly enough.’
‘She phoned me yesterday evening. She was worried, she wanted my help, but you’re right, she didn’t sound . . .’
We were still, for a while, and silent. I was wondering whether I should offer to make tea when she spoke again.
‘This house is so like her. She could make homes beautiful. Her flat in Dundee was the same. You should see my place. Total mess.’
‘Mine too,’ I agreed, but inside I was getting edgy again. My relief at finding Helen was giving way to anxiety. Sooner or later I was going to be found. I would be taken down to the station – ostensibly to make a statement – and find myself stuck there for as long as they chose to keep me. I’d thought I needed Helen but I didn’t need her grieving and helpless. I wanted her functioning.
‘What the hell is that?’ she said.
I followed her gaze along the floor. ‘A humane killer,’ I said. ‘For putting horses down.’
For a second I thought she was going to laugh.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Is it legal?’
I shrugged. ‘Used to be. Back in the 1950s.’
‘Mind if I put it somewhere safe?’
‘Be my guest.’
She stood up, retrieved the gun and put it on the top of a dresser. When she faced me again, the skin around her eyes was blotched pink but I could see she was a long way from breaking down.
‘Did you kill her?’ she asked.
I felt my mouth drop open but I was totally incapable of replying. Whatever she saw made her relax, even half smile.
‘Sorry. Had to ask. So who did?’
‘I’m not sure. But probably not one person acting alone. And it was almost certainly connected to the case she was investigating. I think Dana was close to finding something out. Me too. I think someone tried to kill me, a couple of days ago.’
I told her about the sailing accident, about my discovering the sawn-off mast. When I’d finished she was silent. Then she stood up and walked across the room. She stood in front of a picture I hadn’t noticed before, a small pencil-drawing of a terrier surrounded by high-heeled, female legs. I had no idea whether she believed me or thought me a total fruitcake.
‘I was going to contact you in the morning. To ask you to help me,’ I said.
She turned round again and her face had hardened, just fractionally.
‘Help you how?’
‘Well, stay safe for one thing. But also to find out what’s going on up here and who killed Dana.’
She shook her head. ‘You need to let the police handle that.’
I jumped to my feet. ‘No! That’s just it. The police will not handle it. Dana knew that. That’s why she didn’t trust her colleagues, found it hard to work with them. There is something very, very wrong up here and somehow the police are involved.’
She lowered herself back on to the sofa. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.
I sat down too. ‘This is going to sound a bit weird,’ I began.
Twenty minutes later I finished. A glance at the clock told me it was a quarter past midnight. Helen got up and left the room. I could hear her rustling about in the kitchen. After a minute or two she came back with two glasses of white wine.
‘You were right,’ she said. ‘That did sound weird.’
I gave her a shrug and a goofy half-smile. Well, I had warned her.
‘Trolls?’ she said, giving me an are you serious? look.
I sipped my wine. It was good; crisp and clean, very cold. ‘Well, no. Not real trolls. Obviously not real trolls. But some sort of cult that’s based on an old island legend.’
‘People who think they’re trolls?’
She was wasting my time. I stood up.
‘Sit down,’ she barked. ‘Dana didn’t think you were an idiot and I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt.’ She glanced up towards the dresser. ‘In spite of some evidence to the contrary.’
I scowled, like a teenager who’d just been ticked off. Helen was looking through notes she’d made while I’d been talking and didn’t see my expression. I sat back down again.
‘OK, I need to put Shetland folklore on one side for a moment and concentrate on what we know,’ she went on. ‘You dug up a body in your field that has since been positively identified as that of Melissa Gair. She’d been dead about two years, and shortly before her death she’d had a baby.’
I nodded.
‘Reasonably straightforward so far, if a bit gruesome. The complication comes because Melissa Gair is supposed to have died almost a year earlier. We have a woman who died twice. The earlier death was well documented and witnessed and, on paper at least, is hard to disprove. The second death has the edge, of course, because it has a body to back it up.’ She stopped to take a sip of her wine.
‘Bit of a tricky one,’ I agreed.
‘You’re telling me. Now, because of certain markings on the body, and because of a ring found in your field, you started to think that more than one woman might have been murdered.’
I nodded again.
‘So, you looked up mortality statistics on the islands.’ She bent down and picked up the notes I’d made at the hospital. ‘If your figures are correct . . .’
‘They are,’ I interrupted. She frowned at me.
‘If they’re right, they indicate – I admit – a definite pattern. Every three years, the death rate among young females does seem to increase. OK, now we move from fact on to theory. You theorize that a number of these women . . .’
‘Around six every three years.’
‘Right. A number of these women were abducted. Their deaths were faked – in a busy, modern hospital – and they were held somewhere against their will for a whole year.’ She looked down again. ‘Your best guess is this island called Tronal. During that time they were . . . impregnated?’ She grimaced. So did I.
‘Or they could have been in the early stages of pregnancy when they were taken,’ I said. ‘Like Melissa was. There are just so many stories on these islands about young women, pregnant women and children being abducted, about human bones being discovered. God, this place has more mass graves than Bosnia.’
‘Umm. And these crimes are being committed by grey-clad men who live in underground caverns, love music and silver and fear anything made of iron?’
I said nothing, just glared.
‘OK,’ she said at last, ‘back to the missing women. You think while they were being held prisoner they had babies. Then they were killed. Their bodies were brought back to the mainland and buried in your field
.’
Helen stopped.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s what I think happened.’
She said nothing.
‘It’s exactly like the legend,’ I rushed on. ‘The Kunal Trows steal human wives. Nine days after their sons are born – it’s always a son because they’re a race of males – the mothers die.’
‘Tora . . .’
‘Melissa Gair was killed between a week to ten days after giving birth.’
‘Whoa, whoa . . . Is it remotely possible to fake death in a hospital? Really?’
‘Not so long ago, I’d have said definitely not. Now, I think it could be.’
‘How?’
‘Quite a lot of people would have to be involved: several of the medical staff, maybe an administrator, definitely the pathologist. I’m not sure you could fool a trained medic, but a layman, especially a distressed relative . . . if there was a lot of fuss, plenty of distractions . . . and if the patient was very still, maybe heavily drugged into a coma-like state.’
Helen was whirling the wine round in her glass, staring at the patterns it made. She was giving nothing away but I sensed she was listening.
‘And I think they use hypnosis,’ I went on, thinking what the hell, in for a penny . . .
She stopped twirling. ‘Hypnosis?’ she said. Seeing the look on her face, only the fact that she hadn’t already clapped me in handcuffs and phoned her colleagues gave me the courage to go on.
‘Hypnosis isn’t hokum,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s been scientifically proven. Plenty of psychiatrists practise it. You can alter someone’s perception by planting ideas in their head. I think it just possible that a grieving relative could be shown an apparently lifeless body and be led to believe that person was dead.’
Helen was silent. Then her head started to shake. She wasn’t buying it.
‘All the stories I’ve read emphasize the Trows’ ability to hypnotize people.’
‘They’re just stories.’ She looked incredulous. As well she might. But she hadn’t been in my shoes for the last ten days.
‘I don’t think so any more. I’m sure my boss at the hospital can do it. There was an incident a short while ago with my horse. He put me in some sort of trance; made me do exactly what he told me. And I think he’s done it a couple of times at work too. He puts his hands on my shoulders, looks me in the eye and talks to me. And my mood just changes. I feel calm and happy to do whatever he says.’
Helen’s head was still now, but I couldn’t tell whether she was convinced or not. ‘And there are drugs that can do what you said – make someone look dead?’
‘Absolutely. Just about any sedative, if you take enough of it, will drop the blood pressure so low that finding a peripheral pulse would be all but impossible. It’s risky, of course; you could easily give the patient too much and end up killing them. But a skilled anaesthetist would probably manage it.’
I gave her time to think about it. And I thought about the skilled anaesthetist I knew.
‘How much of this did you discuss with Dana?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t get chance. But I left messages. I told her about the Trow legends. And I know she took me seriously because she has all the books upstairs. She didn’t say anything to you when she called?’
Helen sighed and took another gulp of wine. It was arguable which of us was drinking fastest. We needed to slow down. I, especially, needed to slow down.
‘No,’ she said. ‘She wanted to see me. I could tell she was worried. She didn’t want to talk on the phone.’
‘She learned too much,’ I said, wondering if I’d ever be able to deal with that knowledge. Because of me, because of the messages I’d left her, Dana got too close to whatever was going on up here. She’d paid the ultimate price for my meddling.
As if sensing my thoughts, Helen put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m not dismissing the stats you found, but I’m struggling with this Trow business. We still only have one body. Let’s work with that, shall we?’ She stood up. ‘Come on, let’s see what Dana has to say about all this.’
I looked up at her stupidly. What was she planning, a séance?
‘Let’s go and check her computer. I know her passwords.’
I shook my head. ‘Her desk is empty. The police took it.’
‘Oh, you think?’ she said, and turned to go upstairs.
28
IN THE MAIN bedroom helen hopped up on to a chair in front of the large oak wardrobes and opened the middle of three cupboards that ran along the top. Then she handed down a small canvas suitcase trimmed with red leather. Something large slid around inside. She pulled open the zip and took out a small laptop computer that I recognized immediately.
Helen grinned at me but there was no light in her eyes.
‘The desktop belonged to the Force. This was her own. Dana always copied everything important. Really sensitive stuff she only ever put on here.’
She carried it through to the spare room and fiddled around with leads for a few seconds before opening the laptop. The screen sprang to life. I glanced towards the window. The blind was drawn but I was sure traces of light would be seen outside.
Helen was already busying her way through Dana’s filing system but I was too edgy to sit down and join her.
‘Helen.’
She looked up.
‘You should know the police are almost certainly looking for me.’
She leaned back in her chair and raised her eyebrows. It was such a Dana-like gesture that I didn’t know whether to smile or sob.
‘They want to question me about what happened here today – I mean yesterday. I sort of checked myself out of hospital earlier. Unofficially.’
‘Do they know you have a key to this house?’
I shook my head.
‘They’ll probably work it out. We need to get a move on.’
I joined her at the computer. We were looking at a list of files, each one numbered.
‘Dana gave her cases different numbers from the official ones,’ Helen explained. She was clicking on the bottom of the pile, where the more recent cases were likely to be.
‘She was strong on security,’ I said, remembering Kenn Gifford’s comments about Dana’s paranoia.
‘She was right to be,’ snapped Helen. ‘The average nick would make a sieve look watertight. Here we go.’
Case number Xcr56381 opened up. It was a folder containing a number of files. As I scanned down the list something heavy and cold started to grow in my chest.
The first file was named Missing Persons. Sub-files covered Shetland, Orkney, Scotland and UK. The second file was named Babies. Sub-files were called Franklin Stone Deliveries, and Tronal Deliveries. Then came Financial Records. In that section was a series of names: some I didn’t recognize, several I did. Andrew Dunn, Kenn Gifford, Richard Guthrie, Duncan Guthrie, Tora Hamilton. Not Stephen Gair, though; he had a file section all to himself, with a sub-file for his firm, Gair, Carter, Gow.
‘Spouse is always the first suspect,’ said Helen, opening up the files on Gair. ‘Dana wouldn’t neglect the basics.’
There were a few personal details; his education, early years practising; the dates of his two marriages, to Melissa in 1999 and then to an Alison Jenner in 2005. Most of it, though, was work related.
We looked first at a summary of information about Gair’s firm of solicitors: Gair, Carter, Gow, based in Lerwick but with offices in Oban and Stirling. Most of their business seemed to come from handling commercial contracts for the larger local oil and shipping companies. I noticed, with a pang of alarm, that Gair acted for Duncan’s company and, with no real surprise, that they were legal advisers to the hospital. They also had departments that dealt with family law, conveyancing and trust and probate.
A pulse behind my left temple was threatening to become painful as we slowly ploughed through page after page of statements from the First National Bank of Scotland. Gair, Carter, Gow had numerous accounts. Each of its three branches had both a
commercial account and a deposit account; after a few minutes it was clear the firm held substantial reserves. There were also six client accounts, sorted according to type of client.
‘How the hell did Dana get all this stuff?’ I asked. ‘I can’t believe Stephen Gair just handed it over. Could she have got a warrant this quickly?’
‘Unlikely,’ said Helen, without looking up.
‘So . . . how?’
‘Best not to ask,’ said Helen. She closed down one client account and opened up another. Then she paused and looked at me. ‘Let’s just say Dana wasn’t as strong on procedure as she was on security. In fact it was her unorthodox approach that got her transferred from Manchester to Dundee a few years ago. I was told to keep an eye on her, make her see the error of her ways. Needless to say, I failed.’
‘She got all this illegally?’
‘Almost certainly. There’s very little Dana didn’t know about computers. She did her Ph.D. in software creation. She had a particular expertise when it came to hacking into financial institutions.’
‘How? How did she do it?’
Helen sighed. ‘Tora, I don’t know. I really didn’t like to ask too much. But my guess is that when she moved here, she would have opened accounts for herself in every bank and financial institution based on the island. She’d have visited them frequently, getting to know the staff, copying down account numbers and sort codes. She’d have tried to work out passwords by watching people type on their keyboards. When she was at your house, did you ever notice her looking at private papers?’
‘Yes,’ I said, remembering a time I’d seen her staring at our kitchen noticeboard where we pin our most recent bank and credit-card statements.
‘She had an amazing memory for numbers. And given how much she knew about writing software, she’d have known how to bypass most security systems.’
Sacrifice Page 24
